Wednesday, November 16, 2005

More defending Bush

Do not miss this summary of the strategic overview of the war by Tigerhawk. He is updating something that Steven Den Beste wrote a couple of years ago right after the invasion. It details the motivations and tactics of the terrorists and of the US, and sets up arguments as to why invading Iraq was a sensible thing to do. It’s long and exhaustive on this point, but it doesn’t even cover some other good reasons for taking Saddam out of power, which deserve their own lengthy treatment.

Via Winds, we also have theseother great essays on the war and the stakes we face.

There’s a lot of good argument for the war and the job we are doing over there, and it’s pretty crappy to see that, not only have Democrats who originally thought Saddam was a nasty character and dangerous but are now lashing out with unsubstantiated criticism, not some Republicans have started to get nasty with the President about the war.

I don’t mean here that criticism of the plan, or of aspects of the plan, that may not have been well thought out, is bad. I’m just on the President’s side here when he says that a lot of the criticism has been false and unsubstantiated. People are trying to re-write the history of how this all got started and ignoring facts as they were presented at the time. I.E. it’s one thing to say that since we didn’t find anything we should re-evaluate what we are doing there, or even that the CIA needs reform. But to say that Bush fed us a bunch of misinformation leads me to believe the worst about the mental state of the critics.

If you don’t agree with me (and Donald Sensing), you also don’t agree with the Senate Intelligence Committee.Even so, I don’t think the Senate action taken this week means anything grand. So the Senate now gets quarterly reports about the state of affairs in Iraq. Bully. We’ve just created a few jobs for some office administrators. The thing that isn’t getting emphasized enough is that the Democratic version of that bill got shot down in flames. That bill called for a timetable on withdrawing all troops from Iraq, which the President has said time and time again is a bad idea.

Really, what I’m seeing here is some Senators wanting to make the appearance of disagreement with the President, separating themselves a bit, in preparation for a 2008 Presidential election bid.